A California billionaire is enlisting other wealthy backers in a $490 million scheme to place half of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District into charter schools over the next eight years—a plan at least one critic says would “do away with democratically controlled, publicly accountable education in LA.”
The Los Angeles Times obtained a confidential 44-page proposal, “The Great Public Schools Now Initiative,” drafted by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and other charter advocates.
“Who elected Eli Broad, a man who has said publicly that he knows nothing about education, to redesign the public schools that belong to the people, not to him?”
—Diane Ravitch
“Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation,” the executive summary reads. “Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow.”
The document outlines the following three objectives that would serve to overthrow the current public system:
- to create 260 new high-quality charter schools;
- to generate 130,000 high-quality charter seats;
- to reach 50 percent charter market share.
The initiative seeks to accomplish these ambitious goals between by 2023. As the LA Times reports:
According to teacher and education reform watchdog Peter Greene, writing at his Curmudgucation blog on Tuesday, the plan reads as “forty-four pages of How To Completely Circumvent the Public School System For Fun and Profit.”
“This is not just about educational quality (or lack thereof), or just about how to turn education into a cash cow for a few high rollers—this is about a ham-handed effort to circumvent democracy in a major American city,” Greene continued. “There’s nothing in this plan about listening to the parents or community—only about what is going to be done to them by men with power and money.”
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“There’s nothing in this plan about listening to the parents or community—only about what is going to be done to them by men with power and money.”
—Peter Greene
Among the plan’s sharpest critics is LA Unified school board president Steve Zimmer, who characterized it to LA School Report as a destructive strategy that would ignore the needs of thousands of children “living in isolation, segregation and extreme poverty.”
“This is not an all-kids plan or an all-kids strategy,” he told the online news site. “It’s very explicitly a some-kids strategy, a strategy that some kids will have a better education at a publicly-funded school that assumes that other kids will be injured by that opportunity. It’s not appropriate in terms of what the conversation should be in Los Angeles. The conversation should be better public education options and quality public schools for all kids, not some kids.”
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